Not with a bang, but with a whimper – that was how TS Eliot imagined the world ending. For many others before him and after him, apocalypse fantasies were often something more cinematic: something cataclysmic, violent, spectacular. A giant asteroid wipes us all out, a tsunami of Biblical proportions washes away our civilisation, the crust of the earth we stand on caves in, or simply, nuclear powers trying to prove something end up annihilating each other and everyone else ends up as collateral damage.
That gnawing anxiety that the world is about to end is an ancient one, so one might feel safe in the knowledge that if it hasn’t happened yet, maybe the fear is unfounded. On the other hand, if this is a fear that keeps coming back over and over again, there must be something to it. You cannot simply shrug off the overwhelming dread that your life and reality and all that you hold dear are hanging on by a thread, though you may very well go about your day as though everything is normal. Go to work, do your groceries, maybe check on your loved ones, but like an app running in the background, end-of-the-world feelings are always there. And what is remarkable is how much this beast morphs. It never feels quite like we expected it to feel. Neither an Eliot-style whimper, nor a blockbuster of destruction, we are all currently inhabiting a world which is changing in ways that are hard to comprehend, we are faced with a future that is hard to predict, and hence it feels impossible to look more than just a couple of paces ahead. People used to talk about five-year plans and leaving things to their grandchildren. Nowadays, it seems as though every thought begins with the qualifier “If the world is still here in the year [insert date in the near future] …”
But what is that fear, exactly? Or rather, how do we all imagine the world ending, and do we do it more than in times past? Or is there something extra-doomsday about the times in which we live?
At the risk of falling into the bias of my own perspectival limitation, I would say there is indeed something a little extra frightening about modern times, with reality crumbling in a way nobody quite bargained for. I think about my parents, both in their seventies. Did they, when they were my age, constantly fear that the world was changing so much every single day that it might as well be called apocalyptic? To be fair, they witnessed their share of war, violence, historical upheaval, and personal tragedy. But our current times, ruled by technocrats, deepfakes, algorithms, and societal divisions, are something that puts common sense off kilter in a way that we perhaps do not have the vocabulary to quite describe yet. As I write this, I realise I am writing from the eye of the storm, and perhaps one day, many years after I am gone, and anyone else who is potentially reading this is gone, our times will be analysed. Maybe our epoch will be given a name, with a sheen and a flavour, the way we talk about the “dark ages” or imagine what the Black Death must have felt like. But even the Black Death, which at the time wiped out much of Europe’s population and must have felt like an extinction-level event, played out over time, and survivors rebuilt and moved on. The scar that exists in history is undeniable, but that is what survivors do. They find ways to move on. They take lessons from the past and try to build back better. Sometimes they are wise and put in safeguards to ensure we do not revert to such disasters – this is what we informally refer to as progress. Sometimes we lapse into old mistakes. Sometimes we make brand new mistakes as we hurl ourselves into uncharted waters.
The pandemic we lived through a few years ago, in contrast, was nothing like that. One of the things it did, though, was permanently alter our sense of time and reality.
The Covid pandemic surely pushed us into some of those uncharted waters. Certainly, it was nowhere near as cataclysmic as, say, the Black Death, which wiped out an estimated half of Europe’s population – maybe more. To get an idea of what that means, close your eyes and imagine all the people you know who are still alive, or maybe take a look at your friend list on Facebook. And now imagine, in one fell swoop – boom – half of them gone, dead. The pandemic we lived through a few years ago, in contrast, was nothing like that. One of the things it did, though, was permanently alter our sense of time and reality. Some of the practices that came about during lockdown, like Zoom meetings at odd hours, work-from-home, and a blurring of the once-sacred work/life barriers – these things persisted. The tech sector’s encroachment on our lives had already shifted gears with the explosion of smartphone culture married with social media. With the pandemic and social distancing, we moved into a different kind of hyperreality. Baudrillard would have smiled bleakly. It is a cliché to say “the future is now,” but now, with AI going into avenues nobody was ready for, and in most cases, none of us asked for, the future really is now. And not in a good way. The one thing we considered stable – the fact that we are human – that very foundation is being challenged by tech. AI is writing poetry, making art, and offering to be your sassy girlfriend. The world of our parents is long gone. They thought they knew what the apocalypse might look like. We, on the other hand, have seen enough to know that we have no idea what will hit us next. Will a chip inside my head one day hijack my autonomy and basically turn me into a remote-controlled tool for an evil corporation? I hope I am not around to see such a world, but if this scenario sounds implausibly sci-fi, that’s the point.
The antidote, it seems to me, is a return to empathy and the human qualities that enabled all the good things we truly value. Connect with another human being, and be kind to one another. When the anxiety gets to be too much, seek a friend for the end of the world. Don’t fall for the tricks of the tech companies in their unchecked pursuit of profit, don’t further empower the likes of OpenAI, Google, Meta, Nvidia, Neuralink – entities that will do anything to hijack every square inch of your autonomy and control your mind through integrated platforms, algorithms, and targeted content. This destroys the real connection that has existed between humans for most of history, and turns us into unthinking techno-slave consumers. This era we are facing here is, to redeploy an older expression, a “zombie apocalypse” – but it looks so, so different from the stuff of Hollywood-style gory apocalyptic delights.
Abak Hussain is a writer and journalist.